5 Cruel Traditions You Won’t Believe Existed

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Traditions and cultures are legacies left by our ancestors in the form of procedures or customs meant to be followed and cherished. Common traditions among diverse people give them a common bond and a sense of brotherhood to uphold. While a lot of traditions celebrate humanity and promote kindness, there were some inhumane traditions in the past that just brought atrocities upon one part of the community. You must have heard about Sati Pratha and Child marriage in India but there are many more such traditions all around the world that you won't believe ever existed.

1. Breast Tax

In Travancore regions, only women from higher social strata were allowed to cover their body parts. Lower-class women were not allowed to cover the upper parts of their body and if they wanted to do so, they had to give a tax according to their breast sizes as determined by officials after measuring them. A brave woman, Nangeli, tired of bearing the high taxation cut off her breasts and handed them to the officers who came for tax collection in protest. She died soon after due to heavy bleeding.

2. Lotus Feet

Women in many parts of China earlier were forced into foot-binding practices during their early childhood. Elderly women of the household bound the feet of young girls using tight ropes and clothes after folding their toes or breaking their bones in order to reduce the size of the foot into a tiny lotus as the girl would reshape her broken bones while walking with the tightly bound toes for years. This was a symbol of beauty and status.

Especially famous among the upper strata of women, the woman with a smaller and mutilated Lotus foot was considered a lucky charm for his suitor and was given the highest priority. There were also ranks given to different lotus feet the highest one being the golden lotus. Women in the lower class in anticipation of finding a good suitor had to bear this gruesome practice for a good future.

This painful practice left women with walking difficulties for a lifetime along with years of pain to achieve the golden Lotus status. The survivors of foot binding could be found till the last decade in the rural areas of China.

3. Female Genital Mutilation

It is a practice in African countries, where externals of female genitalia are mutilated to different scales, by chopping off the external parts using a hot blade or a knife in hiding without any medical presence. Female pleasure is considered a taboo and the main cause that leads to women going out of hands or into the clutches of infidelity.

Thus, in order to keep the girls of the family in check and save the honour of the family, female genital mutilation is done in many types including but not limited to clitoris removal, labia removal or total removal of external female genitalia. This leaves young girls horrified and traumatized for the rest of their lives along with infections and disabilities for a lifetime.

4. Leblouh

While today, there is a trend of hitting the gym in order to be slim to look beautiful, you won't believe that girls in African countries like Mauritania are forced to believe that they can be beautiful only when they are fed. The girls are force-fed especially during the rainy seasons to help with their fattening process in order to attract suitors for them, a practice known as leblouh. These girls are fed up to 9000 calories in these places even if the community is suffering from droughts and the country's economy is getting poorer. The extreme fattening process often leaves the girls with persistent health problems and puts them at risk of various organ failures.

5. Baad

In certain areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, whenever a man in the family commits a murder or a hideous crime, the family of the criminal compensates the victim's family by giving a girl child from their family to the other. The punishment for men's crimes in the family has to be borne by the women. The woman went to the victim's family often becomes the centre of attraction to channel the victim's family's agony into anger toward her. 

Endnote

While we have come a long way fighting through these traditions that just exposed women to cruelty just for the sake of someone's pleasure or to fit them into some ideal norms or to keep them in check, we have new traditions and problems coming up the way as we are moving on. Whether we fight them or endure them will decide if they will become norms or evils of society.

Written by: Shagun Shukla